Sunday, June 7, 2015

Maybe you already know it, maybe not. I'm in the process of writing a Powered by the Apocalypse role-playing game: Nahual. I'm Mexican, so this is a Mexican game, based in the universe and works of (also Mexican) artist and graphic novelist +Edgar Clement.

Just recently I had to ask myself (for reasons not important to this post), why I'm powering my game by the Apocalypse? The answer I picked was straight and short, so now I'm trying to expand it here.

First I'll say that I've been wanting to write this game since around 2005 or so. My first idea was to use the d20 Open Gaming License, but back then it was just an idea, no words where put together at all.

I guess the reason I never sit down myself to start writing the game was that it felt odd. I thought about the classes for the game, of course I had to. And what about races or something similar? Then the levels, how skills and feats and all that crunch will help represent the universe of nahuals and angels and devils that Clément is (still) developing. As I said, it just felt odd.

Then I moved to another town, new job, things changed. The idea was left on the pipeline for a while. Then again I decided to continue. It was around 2012. I had found some of the material from The Forge forum. Theory about role-playing games, how system matters, etc. So I decided to create my own brand new system. Except that, despite all the theory and stuff I had read, my main gaming experience was D&D 2E and 3E, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and the old World of Darkness games. So my "brand new system" was just a mirror/shadow of some of the concepts/rules presented by those games, specially the WofD.

Then, I don't remember exactly how, I found out about this indie game called Apocalypse World, by this author named +Vincent Baker, and the comments I'm reading on the internet are quite interesting, and then I saw Mr. Baker talking about game design in a convention in Finland! (via Youtube of course, I've never been to Finland) And I was like OMG!

And then I got my PDF version of the Apocalypse World game, and THEN is when I knew this is how I wanted to make my Nahual role-playing game based on Cléments works. But why?

About Me

My name is Miguel Angel Espinoza. I'm a professional graphic designer and programmer; amateur comic book
artist and fiction writer. I've been playing RPGs since 1995. I'm
making my debut as a game designer with the Nahual RPG project, you can check it out at www.nahualrpg.com.